aylmao

Elections are important, but they're just one part of the political system. A lot of machinations and politics occurs outside the scope of elections or even of the public eye.

Money doesn't just buy ads. It influences the decision of who is a candidate in the first place. It buys operational range. It pays salaries for the right friend of X, the right family member of Y, etc. It buys other bribes, etc.

Then we should limit peroxide and acetone, sure.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to forbid >100ml of acetone in flights, and allow people to bring in, say, a bottle of water or a can of orange juice. We can certainly test if something is acetone or orange juice.

> their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it

I think this is a big part of the problem. Apple owns the IDE and the programming languages; in theory this should lead to a great experience. In practice, because they insist you only use their languages with their ide, and their ide with their languages, it leads to lousy tool design.

Features that would be best implemented as part of the compiler suite are instead be implemented in the GUI. File formats that could be simplified live on, because everyone is using GUIs in the IDE to edit them anyway.

Fixes that should be prioritized in the IDE get punted because the IDE is not competing with any other IDE, it's the only way to develop the language, people will use it anyway, etc.

> All software of comparable size and complexity have shortcomings that everyone learns to work around.

This is part of the issue IMO. Is this size and complexity warranted?

Rust for example; its a complex language, can target pretty much all platforms under the sun, and yet it's configured with just text files, builds with just terminal commands, and works great with any text editor.

I've seen people in big tech work on codebases millions of files big with everything from VSCode to a russian text editor from the 90s. Linus Trovalds is building Linux with MicroEMACS. Why do I need a behemoth like Xcode to build a To Do app? Why does it have to be this "big and complex"?

It's a shame too, because it's always seemed like a very cool platform develop for.

I developed some simple macOS apps as fun side-projects back in the early 2010s but then very much switched to web; the tools are a big reason why.

If you told people in 2006 that 20 years later the best open-source IDE would be open-source, web-based and come from Microsoft, they would've thought you're crazy.

Back then Apple had made waves introducing Safari, which was not only great and cross-platform, but had an open-source renderer (WebKit), and JavaScript engine (JSC). Safari was crushing web standards while IE lagged, seemingly trying to purposefully choke the web to stop it from canibalizing Windows software. Apple was betting on web: one of the big features on their brand-new Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was the Dashboard with widgets that were all built with HTML/CSS/JS, and they were shipping a new, free IDE (Dashcode) to build them too.

Mac OS X was heavily marketed for being UNIX vs Microsoft's proprietary and closed Windows NT. They were building Safari and iTunes for Windows, and had just introduced the first Intel Macs; it seemed like they were out to put a fight against a very closed, very walled, and very incompatible Microsoft who had gotten too comfortable with the Wintel and IE monopolies.

Fast-forward two decades, and not only can you now run a native GNU/Linux environment on Windows, but the best IDE out there is web-based and open-source Microsoft software while Apple lags behind on developer experience. They seems to have missed the bus on web technologies too. They went from leading charge with a stellar browser pushing web standards forward, to being an obstacle out of fear Safari might canibalize iOS software.

Apple hasn't gone full early-2000s Microsoft (thankfully) and Microsoft hasn't gone full early-2000s Apple (unfortunately) but times have really changed.

There's room for both. You can have security checkpoints where they check your bag for liquids, and you should be allowed to fly with them once they confirm its innocuous.

I'm no chemist, but I can't imagine it's hard to test if something is an explosive or just body cream. To pack a punch, I have to imagine explosives need very specific compounds in them.

Never said it’s the only factor, and we shouldn’t assume all pain is the same pain

The type of pain people weight train suffer tends to be related to muscle or tendon damage. The type of pain that comes from sedentarism tends to be related to overworked (weak) muscles and bad circulation.

Why wouldn’t it work if you plan ahead 3-4 years?

Planning ahead doesn’t mean you never suffer from unexpected events, including depreciations. And long timelines help you as much as anyone else.

Another thing to note: slouching and back pain tend to have more to do with back strength than people realize.

I have suffered back discomfort and pain in periods I haven’t gone to the gym for long enough to lose back muscle.

> it might take 3 years instead of 6 months, and the shutdown period would be 1 year instead of 1 month

This matters much more than people (and evidently those within Google) realize

The sound is a bit much, especially during a presentation. I have to keep pausing to rest from it, but overall very cool project.

At least in SF, last I checked, it's as expensive, or sometimes more expensive, as Uber/Lyft. It'll serve the same sector of the population as those apps already do, so it's unlikely to actually reduce parking needs.

There's an argument that more competition could reduce prices and/or wait times for consumers, but there's also the argument it'll take away gig jobs, which are already somewhat of a "backup net" for people who need money but can't find a formal job for some other reason.

I don't live in SF anymore. When I did and now that I occasionally visit, I personally don't see any meaningful difference from when only Lyft and Uber operated there.

> The modern experimentation rejecting God and family doesn't seem to be working out so well.

Although I agree with the sentiment, I think the problem is what replaced it, not that they were replaced. Religious belief has been replaced by a quasi-religion revolving around clipling autodetermination and aggrandizement.

I don't think people suffer from not having faith in some god nowadays, I think they suffer for not having faith, period. I see people around me prefering to live in known discomfort, than choosing to "roll the dice". Religion played the role of teaching people not everything that happens to them is in their control, and comforting them that it would all turn out well. What we have nowadays is the awfuly debilitating belief that everything that happens in your life is your own doing, and that unless there's evidence thigns will work out, there's no reason to believe they will.

I personally see the risk-adversity this philosophy leads to everywhere. I see it in people prefering apps over potentially making a fools of themselves, or "risking it" with a stranger. I see it in people who want leave jobs or living situations but fail to take the leap. I see it in people strugging with even small decisions, obsessing over reading reviews for everything, refusing to commit in relationships.

Religion also gave you a certain peace of mind concerning your purpose in life, and assured you you could be perfectly content with little. In fact it assures you can be more "successful" at life than people who achieve great wealth or fame, since in religion success is measured by, say, devotion, acts of service, building a family, or other means instead.

This can be replaced by positive philosophies that focus people in the prusuit of eudaimonia, but instead have been replaced by reverence to aggrandizement and too often hedonism. The goal too often becomes fame, money, status, or, again, control, both out of fear your life might not be determined by you solely, and for the pursue of vain pleasures.

I see this as a product of an obsessive reverence to libertarian capitalism. Overall, it works very well in its favour. Convincing people the course of their lives depends soley on their own decisions is ingraining reverence for individualism and rejection for collectivism. The pursuit of wealth and status is good for the economy; when people are truly happy with the small things in life, they tend to buy less. I'm not saying libertarian capitalism lead to this philosophy, or that this philosophy lead to libertarian capitalism; I think they go hand-in-hand, and as one grows so does the other.

It's a fun little winter feature. People need to give it a break.

fwiw I went through the whole article with the snow effect on and found it just fine too.

I don't work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don't know the full details, but I heard the new design wasn't introduced until very late in the development process, and at a point in time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns or introducing new features.

So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn't get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn't on what apps.

> Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.

Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years, and I've never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary, I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has changed I've heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.

> There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.

I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can now express something you couldn't. A zero day security flaw brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS doesn't.

This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action.

Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).

It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.

This is a systems problem that can and should be fixed in the system IMO, not by relying on devs executing processes in some correct order.

I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.

WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].

They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.

Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.

[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...

[2]: https://archive.is/ykBOm

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...

> They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.

This is disingenuous and inflamatory, and a manichaeist attitude I very much see in rich western nations for some reason. I wrote about this in another comment: it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI as one of many examples.

The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.

IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.

> Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader.

Except this is not true.

Microsoft became the biggest company in the world with this strategy. Most famoulsy, Windows was a copy of MacOS, and Internet Explorer (which became so dominant it took Microsoft to court) of Netscape. Android copied iOS and became bigger than it. Again, Instagram famously copied Stories from Snapchat, and quickly took over [2]. There's many examples of a bigger company copying smaller ones and using their distribution or ecosystems to win.

> Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google?

I don't know if you're perhaps too young or too new to the industry to know about the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust case, but if Microsoft pulled all the stops it once upon a time did, it would. It so happens Google is has an infinite money machine too though, and can pour many millions in the courts if Microsoft were to try.

> You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.

Let me correct this sentence for you. You'll rarely beat the big companies by copying them, but the big companies can easily beat you by copying you. OpenAI might seem big, but it hasn't found its infinite money machine yet.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomward/2017/05/03/oh-snap-inst...

I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.

But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.

This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.

It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.

By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.

But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

I understand this stance, but I'd personally differentiate between taking the moral stand as a consumer, where you actively become part of the growth in demmand that fuels further investment, and as a contractor, where you're a temporary cost, especially if you and people who depend on you necessitate it to survive.

A studio taking on temporary projects isn't investing into AI— they're not getting paid in stock. This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.

As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.

The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.

IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.

> Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.

I agree that Google isn't great at creating products anymore, but I'm not sure that OpenAI is. We've seen relatively simple products by them (a chat app, a short-form video app, various web interfaces) but we haven't seen anything as complex as some of Google's bigger products (Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc).

If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.

OpenAI would need to make something very complex and hard to copy to give it a solid head start they could really build a moat around— something like Google Maps, which took Apple years to replicate (and other companies won't even try to) or the iPhone, which was years ahead at launch. I just don't think we've seen OpenAI prove it has the capacity to build a product like that yet.

Most people don't get to pick how much money they have, their employer does. Most people don't choose and how much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people have very little say on laws and regulations, but billionaires have friends and family in government.

If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental options for cheaper, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared about the planet, they could use their influence to pass laws for the good of the planet.

Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?

You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to impede anything regulation that would cut into their profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot they can do (and have done) to keep you without any options but gas [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE

The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.

Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.

175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.

That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.

> We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.

IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson.

People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic.

A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about.

There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.